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For many years, the employment relations (ER) literature took the perspective that employee voice via trade unions could channel discontent and reduce exit, thereby improving productivity. In organizational behaviour (OB) research voice has also emerged as an important concept, and a focus of this research has been to understand the antecedents of the decision of employees to engage or not engage in voice. In OB research, however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests. Rather, it is seen as an expression of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate information and ideas to management for the benefit of the organization. This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in particular highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro-social behaviour. We argue that the OB conception of voice is at best partial because its definition of voice as an activity that benefits the organization leaves no room for considering voice as a means of challenging management, or indeed simply as being a vehicle for employee self-determination.

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The decline of institutional industrial relations has led to a major reassessment of the way that traditional industrial relations actors operate. Yet, the debate about institutional change has been characteristically asymmetrical in as much as some institutional actors have figured extensively while others have been much less prominent. Historically, employer coordination has not captured the attention of the industrial relations community and there are relatively few contemporary studies of the activities of employer associations. The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the literature on employers associations and explain how the traditional concept of countervailing power can be developed to re-conceptualise employer coordination. We then argue for a research agenda to reexamine employer associations in light of ongoing changes to employment relations systems that require these bodies to revise the ways that they coordinate employer interests.

We exhibit for each integer n 15 an ordinary irreducible character of the symmetric group S n , which restricts irreducibly to A n , with the property that its degree is divisible by every prime less than or equal to n, thereby proving a conjecture of D.L. Alvis.